I experienced my first instance of griefing today and it was pretty frustrating as the host was afk so we couldn't kick the griefer. After fuming for a bit, I started thinking of ways to mitigate problems like this, and one I came up with is voting to kick/ban a player.

Maybe it could be as simple as a command, and anyone that types it would vote to kick whatever player they typed. Maybe something like a 1/3 or 1/2 of players would have to vote to kick a player.

If a group of griefers (or one with some remote controlled bot help) decides to join the server then they might outnumber the normal players... and then kick/ban everyone else on the server and there's nothing the normal players could do to prevent the overtake... and the griefers will cause even more damage then. The only one who could do something is the admins themselves, but if they are not present then it's a free for all. It's hard to recover from that in the aftermath because it will be hard for the server admin to comprehend what exactly happened and why... and mostly it will result in a server reset and loading a backup.

I've seen it happen in many other games who have such voting systems, so I'm not in favor of that.

Kick/Ban systems only work reliably when there's something like a hierachy system, pretty much like most historical IRC networks have... with Admins and Operators which can't be kicked/banned by the normal population. Because they are the only thing standing between order and anarchy.

So if at all then maybe there should be an additional layer of users with privileged rights... like the admin marking some players as known regular players if they trust them and they have the right to kick someone from the server even if the admin is not present.

I think it'll be better to have "super-user" aka moderator been promoted by admin who will have the power to kick/ban players.

Well, things could be tried. Some servers have an anti-grief system so maybe we could see what works for them.

A team of griefers is harder to come by than a single griefer. SO maybe something like the surrender vote in the PVP silo server.. Where you need a certain % of the vote and a minimum of voters. Let's say 70 percent and 4 people voting ban minimum. Yes perhaps wont work for everyone but it will be an improvement.

Also make it easy and intuitive to vote. You could use F1 for YEs and F2 for NO.

You have no way to know somebody's intentions until they reveal themselves by performing an attack.

There is no practical or sane manner to detect and remove them in advance without inconveniencing legitimate players, giving up a lot of your freedoms as a legit player, or running the risk of false positives and the anti-griefer system itself being used as a means of griefing.

The game probably should include support for server-side mods that allow vanilla clients to connect. This would enable savvy coders to create equivalents to the minecraft mods WorldGuard and LogBlock, which can be used for griefer detection and damage control without being majorly inconvenient for people who want to enjoy the game.

There is a mod on a vanilla server that has detection /anti-grief builtin. It will prevent you from using the decon tool to mass decon the server till xx minutes playing.I believe he will be able to disable nade/flamethrower damage as well. In addition,any time you try to decon an object, it alerts everyone on the server you are trying to do something.

I was going to suggest a ban:reason-based system. When you ban, and put in the reason, that is uploaded to a factorio database. For users who get "grief" as the reason, they get a point (like drivers' licenses in some US states, I've heard) on their account. They can wear off over time...a long time.

Admins can setup the maximum number of points allowed on their server, and when it authenticates users, it also checks their point value. If it is within the limit set, the player can join; if not, they're told "you have too many griefing points against you to join this server."

Of course, no system is anywhere close to perfect when it's a subjective system, that's why I say the points should wear off over time. Along with the griefers, I don't doubt that there are some admins who would feel the need to unnecessarily punish users (by trying to keep them out of OTHER servers, which is in no way their call to make) for varying, inappropriate reasons. So, that wearing off system would be in place mostly to be an anti-bad-admin countermeasure. Something is better than nothing. It's a small multiplayer community, so admins aren't always available, and one griefer can easily cause trouble for many people on many servers in a short period of time.

There are some incredibly intelligent people programming and playing this game, so I'm sure someone could come up with a simple algorithm to improve upon this idea, and assign points to those with admin privileges, which would impose more weight on a point depending on the person who applied the ban. If that person bans a player, and 9 other admins band that same player, those 10 admins are assigned their own value of trustworthiness. As multiple admins with that additional value ban a player, their "ban points" now become worth 1.1points. I'm not saying that these are the exact numbers to use, I'm just giving an example of how it could scale. This would allow true trouble-makers to receive heftier penalties when assigned genuine bans, and this would be showcased by the agreeable bans given by other admins to the same player. This would also setup a new trouble-maker to advance in their points more quickly if they happen to join two servers in a row with high-trustworthy admins and receive grief bans on both. Admins who assign bans to multiple players, many of whom have not received bans from any other admins, would obviously have their value reduced. That way, if it's just an admin with a Napoleon complex, their bans that they think are big and mighty, really don't do much at all.

Also, I've seen a genuine mistake ban made--someone asked who the griefer was, the response was quick, the ban happened, then they said "wait, no, it wasn't them, sorry". So, implementing this system would be good with some weighted bans and/or forcing a "minimum" of 1 point to account for accidental bans, possibly.

OdinYggd said it in my eyes correctly: Griefing is like terrorism. Nothing effectively can be done against it.

From theory it's not possible to implement a system, that protects a game from griefers, cause griefers are always part of the game. If you make something like that, you come to systems that limits the freedom of players. As you can see in reality, where the freedom of innocent people will be limited more and more.

And the theory says, that it is the wrong way to protect the game from the griefers by installing more and more administrative instances over them. It says that the right way to protect the game from griefers is to see griefers as part of the game and equip the game with mechanic to make griefing part of the game.

Which means in practice: Add game-mechanic to protect your property (what you built) from griefing. For example an electric fence around your factory that kills everybody that touches that fence and only you has the key to turn off the fence.

Such a fence is just a stupid example. There are 1000 things possible, we need just to look to the reality and implement similar mechanisms.

Reputation services can be quite effective yet (relatively) simple to implement. Say you have the option of reporting a player, if a condition is met (might be configurable per server, eg % of votes, admin only, etc) that server reports the offender. One report on its own does nothing, you need say 3 servers to report you and then you lose the Deconstruction Planner, then the ability to place ghosts, then modify other players' entities, etc until at some point your account is permanently banned from multiplayer at say 20 reports.

Now you need something to balance the reports, I'd avoid a "good" reputation as most players wouldn't bother. It could be something as simple as randomly between 1 week and 1 month you lose a report (the number is hidden to you) as long as you have been actively playing multiplayer.

Lastly a means to stop it being used to grief, which is quite simple. In addition to your reputation, you have a report reputation. If you frequently report players (especially those with low reputation), and those players don't get further reports against them, your reports carry no weight. You can still boot them from the server but it won't affect their reputation.

The biggest problem is the security of the reputation server, it would need to be very secure against attacks.

ssilk wrote:
Which means in practice: Add game-mechanic to protect your property (what you built) from griefing. For example an electric fence around your factory that kills everybody that touches that fence and only you has the key to turn off the fence.

By robot deconstructing is impossible to compare who built this entity and who is marked to deconstruction.